Hello everyone and welcome to the Stephen King cast, One Man's Musings on the Works of Stephen King.

Each week I will review one entry in the bibliography of Stephen King and the chronological order of publication, and this week I'm examining one of King's big ones, a divisive novel within his ongoing Dark Tower series, the tale of wizardry, witchcraft, of love and sacrifice, the imagery-rich and beautifully detailed story that expands the already fleshed-out mythology of the multiverse that had he'd begun in earlier installments.

A novel that begins on a train, ends in the Emerald City from the Wizard of Oz and returns to the plague decimated world of the stand.

It's the tale of roll in the gunslinger's most formative period of time,

where the boy became the man that we know him to be,

the tale of his first love, which, unsurprisingly for our gunslinger, is a doomed one.

During these pages we see why he's both a romantic and as

heavily guarded as he is. The novel is 1997's The Wizard and Glass. Like I said, this novel is

divisive among King fans. For fans of the Dark Tower, many either love it or hate it, and I can see both sides.

Personally, for me, this was a huge novel. This was the first new Dark Tower book for me.

See, up until this point, when I had begun to read Stephen King, he had already published

The Gunsinger,

the drawing of the three, and the wastelands. So for me, there had been no waiting period

in between those novels. When I finished one, I simply picked up the next one. Until I got to

the wastelands, that is. Then, like everyone else who had entered Midworld before me, I had to wait.

So during the introduction of 1996's The Green Mile, when he mentioned that we'd be seeing a new

dark tower novel soon, my level of anticipation and excitement went through the roof.

And his acknowledgement of my having to wait was reinforced with his anecdote of a fan sending him a picture of a teddy bear with a note saying,

if we don't get a new Dark Tower book, the Bear gets it.

It was then.

Then I learned that I wasn't the only one.

That the Dark Tower was a series that was just as loved and one that caused just as much anxiety from anticipation

...